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Welcome to the part two of High Performance Habits for Investors with Brendon Burchard. For those of you who haven’t read that episode and are joining us for the first time, I do suggest reading episode 118 part one first. Brendon is widely considered the world’s leading high-performance coach. He’s one of the most watched, quoted and followed personal development trainers in history. He’s also one of the most followed public figures on Facebook and his videos have been viewed more than 100 million times. He’s got a lot of students. More than two million students have completed his online courses and his video series. He has got some great books out there, High Performance Habits. I highly recommend it. I’m honored to have Brendon on the show. Let us continue with my interview with Brendon Burchard.
If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to High Performance Habits For Investors – Brendon Burchard.
Enjoy the show!
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High Performance Habits For Investors – Brendon Burchard (Part 2)
In summarizing the first high performance habits, seek clarity. I like to think about how that applies to real estate investors and entrepreneurs who are joining us on the show. We’re talking about developing skills and strengthening those skills, setting goals, creating a roadmap and executing on those goals. Be the person you want to become. One thing you were saying, and I don’t know if it ties in directly to this habit but you, at one point you talked about replacing certainty with curiosity. I love that so much. You can’t learn if you think you’re certain or comfortable or confident about something. If you live life with a mindset of curiosity, you’re always open to learning more new things.
This was a surprise, especially in the personal development industry. Lots of people are running around saying, “You want a life with certainty but the problem is if you get it, you’ll be miserable.” There’s never, “You’re never going to get it.” It’s also the wrong target. In a world that’s constantly changing and relationships that are constantly evolving, you’re never going to be fully certain of anything including yourself. If you are certain of yourself, you’ve got an ego problem. What we want are genuine confidence and intellectual curiosity. This is what the data showed as well. Confidence is I believe in my ability to figure things out. Real confidence is the ability that I know I can learn or adapt to do well here. It doesn’t mean I know everything. It doesn’t mean I’m certain how it’s going to go. It means I trust in my ability to learn or adapt and over a period of time, I’ll do fine here. I’ll make it through. I’ll survive.
The difference is when we ask high performers to rate the things that were most important to them, curiosity was way up there. They felt that was a differentiator. Curiosity makes you learn. It makes you seek clarity. It makes you better in relationships because you ask people questions. If you ask people questions, if you’re curious about other people, you deepen your relationships with them, which deepens your business with them. Larry King is a great mentor and a friend. He says his number one secret to success in life was his curiosity and so does every other major person that we aspire to. They were ferocious learners and they were curious about life whether it was da Vinci, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mother Teresa. We’re all deeply curious about their topic, their area of expertise to other people as well and that allowed them to flourish.
Habit number two, generate energy and preserve it. Do you want to summarize what that means?
This was the hardest one academically to measure. We knew high performers had higher levels of energy, but we didn’t know exactly what that meant. We codified it essentially into understanding that high performers have higher mental, physical and emotional energy than other people. This is important for your audience because this has blown my mind. If you’re the CEO or solo entrepreneur, you use the same amount of mental and emotional energy as an NFL quarterback does to succeed. We can measure it on those two things. Maybe not the same physical energy on the field but mentally and emotionally, your output each day is the same as an NFL quarterback. People don’t think of themselves as athletes, but you are an athlete of the mind, you’re an athlete of the emotions, you’re an athlete of your physical body. If you compromise any of those three, mental, emotional or physical, you can compromise those. You don’t work on developing those or refueling and recharging those, you become the burnout. You cannot become a high performer if you’re consistently burning out.
Though some people say, “You don’t understand but I sleep five hours a night. It doesn’t compromise me.” It does. You’re just not aware of it because you’re dumb. You don’t know and people get mad at me when I say that but it’s true. If you take a cognitive test after five hours of sleep versus seven or eight, it looks like you’re a sixth grader. You think that you’re doing well but there are a lot of bullies in sixth grade who also thought they were doing well but they were wrong. Sometimes you’re not aware of what you’re not aware of. The issue is so many people aren’t working on their emotions. They’re not taking care of themselves physically. They’re not using their mind to generate the energy that’s necessary. It’s like high performers have greater stamina energetically than other people. It’s one of the reasons they outperform other people, but they don’t have that by gift. They work to make sure they’re caring for the self. This is common sense to people.
It sounds like it’s all common sense but you’re talking about it as if nobody does it.
Look at how many burnouts there are. Look at how many people are wiped out and exhausted by Wednesday when they’ve got to be amazing until [spp-timestamp time=”7:00″] PM on Friday. It’s not, “Are you getting through?” The boundary between a successful person and a high performer is often the wellbeing. It’s often the energy that they experience throughout the week. You’ve been there and I’ve been there too. When it’s a slog, you’re succeeding but you’re not happy. When it’s a slog, you’re getting through but is life about getting through? It’s about the quality of life you want. If you want to be heightened, you’ve got to manage that mental, emotional and physical energy better and that’s all the wellbeing stuff that we all know we should do.
People know how to take care of themselves. People know how to exercise. People know that they should be eating better and they can’t if they want to. I’m wondering if the mental piece is the one that people struggle with the most.
Mental health is ultimately the great differentiator. With physical, you might be able to say, “Some people have a specific genetic about it,” or emotional. You could say, “We can’t control our emotions,” which is wrong. A lot of people never give themselves the mental recharge they need throughout the day. The largest study that has ever been done on creativity with data at least, there’s evidence that millions and millions of people involved in a productivity app and they ran productivity study based on their interactions with the app. They found out that the highest performing people in the world take a break on average every 52 minutes. You and I both know we don’t necessarily need a break every 52 minutes. You and I can go for four or five hours without a break.
The highest performers in the world give themselves that mental break because they know that recharges them. I take a break every 50 minutes not because I need it in the morning, but I know that refueling in the morning means I still got gas at [spp-timestamp time=”4:00″] PM, [spp-timestamp time=”5:00″] PM, [spp-timestamp time=”6:00″] PM, [spp-timestamp time=”7:00″] PM. What most people are doing is they’re compromising themselves in the short-term not realizing the long-term damage. Mentally, that’s why it’s important to do the mental break, the meditation, the step away from the screen, the closing of the eyes, the simple act of every fifteen minutes go and get some water, walk around the building, walk around the house. Come back and get back at it. Give yourself that three to five-minute break every fifteen minutes and you’ll find that by the end of the day you haven’t crashed.
This is not standing around the watercooler chitchatting. You’re implying that you’re doing something more selfish, something for yourself.
You’re closing your eyes taking ten deep breaths. You’re taking a walk. You’re taking a five-minute meditation. In the book, we teach this thing called release tension set intention where you push away from the desk or you stand up, you close your eyes for two minutes, you focus on releasing the tension in your body and releasing the tension in your mind by releasing thoughts. That can be a mantra-based thing or a meditated based thing for people. Then once that’s clear, once you feel the tension releasing, lifting up a little bit, then you set your intention for the very next activity you are going to do. You set the intention, open your eyes and get back at it. Simple things. There are dozens of things that we listed in the book that high performers do worldwide to recharge a little bit throughout the day so that they’re powering through the day not slogging through that day.
It’s a matter of doing it. A lot of these things at the end of the day are not overly complicated and they’re relatively simple. It’s a matter of knowing it and doing it as opposed to wondering, “What am I doing wrong?”
Your discipline is a choice whether you’re going to be in the bottom 85% or the top fifteen. It’s not like high performers are special human beings that allow them to be in the top fifteen. High performers are doing the same thing everybody else listening too that you and I deal with. High performers aren’t different human beings. They’re enacting different practices. They’re activating themselves more consistently. A good example is high performers are 40% more likely to work out five times per week than the rest of 85% of the world. That five times might be a fast 45-minute walk or it could be any given anaerobic or aerobic activity. They’re 40% more likely than the rest of the public to do that.
If you told me, “Brendon, there’s a 5% more likelihood that you will achieve ultimate success in your life if you’ll do this,” I’ll go, “Absolutely.” If you told me 40%, I’d be stupid not to. That’s a worldwide data. It’s like, “Get at it. Everyone knows they should take care of their health.” I always tell people, “If you’re an adult and you’ve never said in your life, ‘These next twelve months, I’m going to get the best health of my life,”‘ whatever that means for you, you describe it. If you’ve never given yourself that challenge, give yourself that challenge because what you’ll learn about yourself through it will be worthwhile. Let alone if you achieve bits and pieces of it, you’ll feel so much more incredible. Everyone knows when you feel incredible, you get more done. When you feel incredible, life is better. When you feel incredible, you’re going to succeed beyond everyone else.
I wholeheartedly believe that that is so true because I feel it. I know the difference when I’m into it and I feel it. I love this high performance habit number three because I am very goal-oriented. Your habit is believing in the necessity of achieving your goal. We all here set goals, write your goals. If you take this to another level, how would you describe this habit?
I wouldn’t have guessed this would make the top six because all these are the strongest correlations with long-term success and this habit is called raise necessity. What high performers do is they mentally raise necessity. They make it necessary to succeed in the situations they’re going into. If you’ve got two people and they’re equally qualified to win the gold medal, they’re at the block about to start that sprint and you say, “Brendon, which one is going to win?” I’m going to say, “The one who is going to win this race is the one who believes it’s necessary to win this race more than the other guy.” You have to use your mind to make it necessary because in the context, winning is necessary there. A person who is using their mind differently saying, “It is necessary for me to win this race because my mom would be inspired. This would be my way of giving back. It’s necessary for me to win this because I put in the hours. It’s necessary for me to succeed here because my back is against the wall, the bills are due. It’s necessary for me to succeed here because my wife needs me on my A-game right now. It’s necessary for me to succeed here because my identity says that I’m a person of excellence. There are stakes here. I have to do well.”
High performers insist that they do that more often than underperformers. They purposely do what they ask. It’s like, “Who needs me to be great here? Why is it necessary I do well here?” They ask those questions that most people don’t, but it literally is. They feel it in their heart. It is part of their identity as a person. It wasn’t born that way, they made it that way by their self-talk. They say, “I’ve got to do great here. This is my time. It’s necessary for me to win. People are watching. This counts. This matters.” When most people wander into the meeting, the high performer goes, “It’s necessary for me to go in and crush this meeting.” It’s a different self-talk and a different expectation. It’s a higher expectation and a higher standard they have because they’re raising intellectual necessity to do well.
Are we fostering an obsession by doing that?
Yes, we can’t fear obsession. There are two types of obsession. There are the obsessions that make you stupid, blind and ruin your life. Everything else falls apart because you’re obsessed so much. That’s an unhealthy obsession. Steve Jobs was obsessed. Martin Luther King had an obsession. John F. Kennedy had an obsession. Every titan you study in any given area of business were obsessed. You can have an obsession, which means almost like a monomaniacal focus. Your obsession gives you the passion, the focus, the drive that is necessary and you can’t fear it. The people who fear obsession are the people who lack self-control. The people who have self-control, their obsession can be a great differentiator. We write about the academic and theoretical differences in the book but then we tell you how to activate it too. For those who are arguing with me, you’re like, “That’s not true. Obsession is bad,” you haven’t done enough research and I say that with respect.
A lot of people think things in personal development, but they have no data and they’ve not done the worldwide research to understand human behavior. They go off of what they think and this is when a lot of people go off and they’re like, “Obsession is bad.” I’m like, “What research do you have on that? Tell me.” Anyone you’ll ever see like Pat Riley, one of the winningest coaches in the world, he said, “To have a long-term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some kind of way.” You have to be willing to pour your heart and soul into something. Charles Dickens said, “Whatever I’ve tried to do in life, I’ve tried to do with all my heart to do it well. Whatever I have devoted myself to, I devoted myself to completely.” If you’re going to be a great father, there’s an obsession there. If you’re going to be a great spouse, there’s an obsession there. It’s important that people understand that. Da Vinci talked about it, Jim Rohn talked about it. People who do work at the highest levels know that. You’ll never have a sense of duty if you don’t have a sense of obsession first.
You probably know you’re there when you find that time passes by and you don’t even realize that time is passing you by when you’re doing what you’re doing.
There’s a sense of flow that happens or a sense of urgency that happens that makes you love what you’re doing. No one has an obsession unless they deeply have a passion and interest there. No one should fear a deep passion and interest. You can have a deep passion and interest as long as you’re also vitally aware of your time. You’re managing your time well so that you still have time to be a good mom. You still have time to be focused on your health. You still have time to meet your responsibilities well. Obsessions are only to be feared if you won’t focus on your own time management.
Number four, increase your productivity. This was an interesting one for me because you talked about a prolific quality output or PQO.
High performers outproduce other people in general. They increase productivity over the standard norm. That sounds like a no-brainer except what happens with people as they often don’t know anything about productivity at all. They think that busy work is what matters. They think that the number of tasks is what matters and they haven’t distilled down to PQO, which is prolific quality output. What are the outputs in your industry or field that matter the most for you to succeed there? For you to focus on those needle movers? What are the activities that move the needle the most towards your long-term success in that space? Focusing on those and the magical formula you need to learn is 60/40. 60% of your week needs to be focused on PQO, those needle moving activities.
It doesn’t mean you need be one of the people who is an extremist as well. Don’t do anything else and you don’t need to do the 80/20 Pareto Principle because anyone who studied productivity knows that’s not true. Go ahead and try to give 80/20 in this world. It’s not possible, but you can give 60/40 and that’s what high performers do. That’s what the data shows. They weren’t doing 80/20 towards one thing, they were doing 60/40. 60% of the time this spoke on the main key activities that move the needle forward. 40% was dealing with the day, dealing with email and administration and stupid stuff that we all have to do. When they did that 60 % that was blocked time, that was all they did. That deep work, that time was protected. You’ve got to figure out what moves the needle most in your industry and focus there. That’s increasing productivity.
Then they also develop influences, the fifth habit. Developing influence is all about understanding three things with people. Number one, if you’re going to have influence with other people, you have to teach them or guide them how to think. If you’re a leader, you have to teach them how to think about your business. Teach them how to think about the competition. Teach them how to think about the industry or the overall opportunity or your world. You have to teach them how to think about themselves in that and teach them how to think about other competitors. It’s about guiding people’s thoughts. That’s what develops influence with other people.
The second thing in developing influence is learning how to challenge people. You can influence them and you can challenge them. This is one thing that high performers do. They’re more direct, they’re more explicit in their communication, they’re more willing to challenge someone and say, “Young man, young woman, you’re better than this.” They’re willing to say, “I appreciate this report but you can do better. Take it back and try again.” They’re always challenging people and that’s how they develop influence. The third way they develop influence is they role model the way. You’re so good about this with all your podcast. You literally live, eat and breathe. You do this stuff and that is why you have such a top-rated podcast because they know they’re coming to a source that walks the talk. That’s developing influence and high performers do that on purpose.
The last thing they do, the sixth habit is to demonstrate courage. They demonstrate courage not by jumping in rivers to save people. The courage is a function of two things. Are you sharing what you want, think, feel, dream of, need with other people openly, honestly and explicitly? Courage is a function of your expression of truth. Does the world, do your peers, does your friend, does your family, does your spouse know what you want, know what you think, know what you need? Speaking up for yourself is a sense of courage. The other part of demonstrating courage though is speaking up for other people. High performers were more likely to interrupt a meeting to speak up for a co-worker who just got shot down. They are more likely to cheer on somebody else when no one else was. Those two things culminate into the self and the social part. The other part of courage is the willingness to every day try something that you don’t know how to do to reach an outcome you want.
High performers spend more time in uncertainty than they do certainty. They spend more time trying and testing things out in self-experimentation in other people. Self-experimentation, trying things, it takes courage to be willing to be wrong, to be willing to self-adjust, to be willing to try something way outside your comfort zones and that’s what they’re doing. That’s the six. Seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence and demonstrate courage. What I do with High Performance Habits is that I break those down into what you do on the personal side and what you do on the social side. It’s a real-world book versus like, “Here’s our fancy big study.” I break it down into eighteen practices that anybody can do over and over again to achieve long-term success.
It is a great book. I highly recommend people to pick it up, listen to it or read it at least once or twice. It can help set the right direction for you and break through whatever hurdle you have in front of you. I want to ask a question about the courage thing. A lot of people hold themselves back on building courage because they have to overcome a fear and fear is the opposite of courage. You may have answered this question, but a lot of people have a hard time breaking through fears. Do you have a hack, a tip or a suggestion on how someone can get past their fear so they can work on building their courage?
Where you said fear is the opposite of courage, a lot of people feel that. It almost puts them in two camps. When you have courage, that fear isn’t there but the truth is fear is always going to be there. The way to overcome fear is you’re not supposed to overcome it. It is going to be there, you need to dance with it. I go on stage in front of 25,000 people. I spoke to 55,000 people live at arenas, conference centers, hotel ballrooms. I was out there. I’m backstage and I’m still feeling the fear, but I allow the fear to mobilize me. The fear isn’t the focus, the objective or getting more mindshare than the mission is. The mentality is you have to have your mind fixed on a bigger star than yourself. When it’s fixed on yourself and how you feel, when the mentality is like, “How do I feel here?” and you obsess about, worry about and ennoble the fear to take over, instead get your mind into what your objective is. Get your mind into what you do want. Put yourself talk into saying, “I’m going to do this then I’m going to step up through here. Then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do that.”
That’s what’s giving your mind the confidence that you’ll be able to activate to figure things out. Allow the fear to be there. Just don’t let it win. Instead, use your mind and your self-talk to focus on the objectives you do know or you do want. That’s number one. That’s in the performance situation. Your preparation before the performance situation matters just as much. Fear can be overcome by habituation. Meaning given the proximity of it, do it a lot of times, practice. If you can practice and have a mentor or a guide giving you feedback, then by the time you get there, you’ve run that route so many times that you’re comfortable with fear. You don’t have to think about the fear anymore, you think about all the practice and all the distinctions you’ve learned.
Preparation can help you obliterate that sense of fear. Then when you’re in it. If the fear is still there, let it be there and focus on the objectives and you’re stepping through. I’ve worked with a lot of advanced military personnel. It’s one of my great blessings. When they’re training them to go on a mission, they run that as a tactical unit over and over again. It’s not that the fear is not going to be there or the adrenaline is not going to be there. They’re just focused so much on, “What’s the next step? If I open this door, there’s a bad guy there then I do this. If I open the door and the bad guy is not there, I advance to door number two.” They tactically walk it through their mind so many times that even though the adrenaline and the fear are there, they know the next step. That gives them the confidence above the fear.
For real estate investors, I would summarize that as work hard, expect setbacks, expect some frustration but persist through it all.
Get a mentor whom you can follow, who’s aspirational, who can give you some feedback especially in any investing level. Having mentors or other people to discuss and dialogue through, be in a mastermind to discuss and dialogue through, because a lot of fear is actually overcome in a discussion. When you talk things out, people give you other perspectives and it helps lessen that emotional hole that you’re going to have when you see that everybody else deals with it too.
This is all powerful stuff. You spend hours, if not a whole day, in front of people talking about this stuff. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience?
Real gratitude and props. If you are reading this, the work that you are putting in right now in your personal and professional development matters. Keep reading this blog. Keep following Marco and see what he’s doing because this time you put in now, these little distinctions, they add up over a period of time that becomes a true force in your sales to push you forward.
Thank you, Brandon. You’re an amazing guy and you have a lot of great and amazing content. Where can our audience find out more about you, your books and your programs?
Search for my podcast, which is called The Brendon Show. If you liked anything that I talked about, go to The Brendon Show and listen. When you go to The Brendon Show, make sure you hit download all episodes because season number four of The Brendon show is the entire audiobook of High Performance Habits. It’s there for free. There’s no sales or pitches in it. I took the audiobook and I uploaded it as Season four as an Easter egg in there for my audience. I just did it to reward the people who downloaded all my episodes and people freaked out about it. You can go buy the book for $30 on Audible or wherever it is or literally get the whole thing jut by subscribing to The Brendon Show Season four. Go to The Brendon Show, listen, tune in and figure out what you want to work on in your life. We talk about all things personal and professional development.
Your website is Brendon.com.
You can go there and learn all about me or get to The Brendon Show.
Brendon, thank you ever so much for all your time. You’re a wealth of knowledge and you’re very inspirational. I look forward to seeing you at your next event. Thank you for coming on the show.
Thanks for being the high performer in this field. I appreciate you.
Thank you and you too.
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I hope you enjoyed the two-part interview with Brendon Burchard on High Performance Habits for Investors. Don’t forget to download our free report, The Ultimate Guide To Passive Real Estate Investing. It is a fantastic mini eBook. It has been downloaded thousands of times and so feedback has been great. It’s being turned into a full-fledged book so keep an eye out for that. We hope to have it out in the last quarter of this year, if not at the beginning of 2019.
If you are looking to invest in real estate, don’t forget to talk to one of our investment counselors and get yourself a free strategy session. That’s what they’re there for. We’re here to help you. If you have any questions about real estate investing, just click the Ask Marco! button at the top of the website at PassiveRealEstateInvesting.com. I am happy to respond and answer your questions. I’ll cover some of those here on this podcast. Just give me some time to respond. I’m very busy. I travel a lot. If I don’t reply right away, understand that I do have your email. I haven’t had the time to get to it yet. Thanks for joining. We appreciate you being a subscriber to this show. We will see you again in the next episode.
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